ISSN 2149-9446 | Volume 05 | Issue 10 | July 2020 | Cultural Studies

A Postcolonial Approach to Contemporary Refugee

Literature: Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy

SERCAN HAMZA BAĞLAMA

Abstract

Refugee Boy (2001) by Benjamin Zephaniah literalises the refugee experience in contemporary
society, reveals the psychology of loss, unbelonging and displacement and helps universalise
the traumatic realities of the refugee phenomenon upon innocent people in a ‘remote’ part
of the world through its 14-year-old Eritrean-Ethiopian protagonist. In the novel, in order to
be accepted and included into the mainstream ‘white’ society, the protagonist has a tendency
to reshape and reconstitute his identity and personality in relation to what is presented as
the proper and the superior. Such a sort of properness and superiority is discursively formed
within the framework of the operation of the orientalist mentality and creates an ideal refugee
identity, which resembles the case of the colonial subject in contemporary postcolonial fiction.
In this context, this article, suggesting that the protagonist of the novel might be considered
as a colonial subject, will investigate whether postcolonial theory might critically contribute to
the analysis of contemporary refugee literature. This article will also attempt to theorise the
process of postcolonial interpellation and explore the relevance of this conceptualisation in
terms of articulating the refugee experience through a close reading of the novel.

Keywords: Benjamin Zephaniah, Refugee Boy, Postcolonial Theory, Postcolonial

Interpellation, Social Inclusion

Research Paper

Recieved: 23.04.2020
Accepted: 23.06.2020

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3361-6616

E-mail: sercanhamza@gmail.com
 ISSN 2149-9446 | Cilt 05 | Sayı 10 | Temmuz 2020 | Kültürel Çalışmalar

Çağdaş Mülteci Edebiyatına Postkolonyal Bir Yaklaşım:

Benjamin Zephaniah’ın Refugee Boy Adlı Romanı

SERCAN HAMZA BAĞLAMA

Öz

Benjamin Zephaniah’ın Refugee Boy (2001) adlı romanı çağdaş toplumda mülteci deneyimini
kurgusallaştırır; yurtsuzluk, ait olamama ve kayboluş hâlini yansıtır ve on dört yaşındaki yarı
Eritrealı, yarı Etiyopyalı ana karakteri aracılığıyla mülteci olma durumunun dünyanın ‘uzak’
bir köşesindeki suçsuz insanlar üzerindeki travmatik etkilerinin evrenselleştirilmesine olanak
sağlar. Romanda, ana karakter, ‘beyaz’ toplumun bir parçası olabilmek adına, ‘düzgün’ ve
‘üstün’ olarak sunulan doğrular bağlamında kimliğini ve kişiliğini dönüştürme ve şekillendirme
yönelimine sahiptir. Bu tür bir ‘düzgünlük’ ve ‘üstünlük’, oryantalist algının işleyişi çerçevesinde
söylemsel olarak inşa edilir ve postkolonyal edebi eserlerde ‘ideal’ bir göçmen olmaya çalışan
kolonyal öznelerin durumuna benzer bir ‘ideal’ mülteci kimliği yaratır. Bu argümanları dâhilinde,
romanın ana karakterinin kolonyal bir özne olarak da görülebileceğini belirten bu çalışma
postkolonyal teorinin çağdaş mülteci edebiyatına ait eserlerin eleştirel analizi noktasında katkı
sağlayıp sağlamayacağı konusunu inceleyecektir. Ayrıca, bu çalışma ‘postkolonyal eklemlenme’
sürecini rasyonalize etmeye çalışacak ve romanın yakın okumasını yaparak ‘postkolonyal
eklemlenme’ kavramının mülteci deneyimini anlamlandırmadaki uygunluğu üzerinde
duracaktır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Benjamin Zephaniah, Refugee Boy, Postkolonyal Teori, Postkolonyal

Eklemlenme, Toplumsal Kaynaşma

Araştırma Makalesi

Geliş Tarihi: 23.04.2020

Kabul Tarihi: 23.06.2020

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3361-6616

E-mail: sercanhamza@gmail.com
632 Sercan Hamza BAĞLAMA

1. Introduction
The twenty-first century can be seen as an age of the international refugee ‘cri-
sis’ because millions of people have had to flee their countries of origin due to
political, sociocultural and economic reasons. Many of them, despite their di-
verse racial, religious or political backgrounds, have shared similar experiences
based on physical, emotional and psychological traumas in their homelands.
Refugees’ common journeys through victimisation, trauma and resettlement
have been studied and addressed in various academic fields. Also, policy makers
have tried to address practical ways to potentially resolve acute concerns and
problems. The academic field of literature is not an exception. Literary works
generally tell ‘simple’ stories of ‘common people’ in a more or less documentary
style and genuinely portray a different aspect of those ‘simple’ stories through
the represented experiences of their characters while they indirectly suggest a
human-centred framework/model. The power of literature might help interna-
tionalise ‘simple’ stories of ‘common people’ and open up a new possibility of
informing people in different parts of the world, which might offer world citizens
with diverse interests an opportunity to rethink some of the most important con-
cepts in contemporary life concerning humanity such as race, class, gender, the
human and the global.
Contemporary refugee literature1 , in this context, symbiotically responds to so-
ciocultural and political circumstances at the present time and, directly or indire-
ctly, narrates current issues such as war and civil war, fundamentalist terrorism,
religious extremism, human right violations, and political and racial turmoil. Li-
terary works, which can be classified as part of refugee literature, mostly pro-
vide a realistic snapshot of the nature of the refugee ‘crisis’ and thematise the
process of victimisation and dehumanisation experienced by internally displaced
persons, refugees and asylum seekers fleeing the civil war in Syria or elsewhe-
re in the Middle East or the Global South. The domestic, sociocultural, political
and ideological tendencies of refugee characters in contemporary fiction written
by and about refugees help us universalise the refugee experience, reconsider
the refugee phenomenon in relation to the broader political and historical fra-
mework of social inequalities and injustices and attempt to tackle the situation
through the development of progressive, egalitarian and anti-discriminatory the-
ories and practices.

1
Exit West (2018) by Mohsin Hamid, The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) by Dina Nayeri, The Refugees (2017) by Viet Thanh
Nguyen, The Lightless Sky: My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee (2019) by Gulwali Passarlay and By the Sea (2002) by
Abdulrazak Gurnah might be considered as the examples of contemporary refugee literature.

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 A Postcolonial Approach to Contemporary Refugee Literature:
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633

Refugee Boy (2001) by Benjamin Zephaniah, in this regard, can be categorised as

an example of contemporary refugee literature since it fictionalises the refugee
experience in a ‘strange’ land and exposes the traumatic effects of war and poli-
tics upon innocent people through its 14-year-old Eritrean-Ethiopian protagonist,
Alem Kelo, who has fled the war and ended up as a refugee in the UK. Written
after the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict in the Horn of Africa, Refugee Boy portrays
the nature of displacement and the psychology of loss, unbelonging and nothing-
ness and suggests an alternative fictional model for the critical articulation of the
lives of asylum seekers and refugees. Despite the fact that the novel seems to be a
teen novel in terms of its style and vocabulary, it treats refugee-related issues wit-
hin the framework of sociocultural inclusion and exclusion strategies, challenges
the ideological marginalisation of multiple identities and transnational practices
through a non-Eurocentric perspective and gives voice to those who have been
underrepresented, silenced and unacknowledged. In the novel, Zephaniah’s third
person narrative also helps reveal that refugees cannot be considered as a repre-
sentative of a certain national, religious or cultural group since each of them has
diverse personal tendencies and motivations. This rejects a reductionist approach
about refugees and asylum seekers and deconstructs their stereotypical represen-
tation on different platforms including literature and media:
I have never been here but I know that England is a nice country, there are some good
people here, you must remember that. And back home there are some good people
too, not everyone back there wants to fight the war, most people would love to just get
on with their lives. So remember, there are good and bad everywhere (20-21).

In the novel, the sociocultural and ideological tendencies of the protagonist,

however, resemble those of immigrant characters in postcolonial literary texts,
such as Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
(2009), since Alem aspires to fit into the logic of the dominant system in order
to be acknowledged and appreciated and to sustain his political existence2 in a
hostile environment. As a refugee seeking asylum in the UK, Alem unconsciously
attempts to remould and reconstitute his identity and personality in relation to
the narratives of the civilizational superiority of the West and essentially inter-
nalises what is discursively presented as ‘proper’. His desire to culturally belong

2
Giorgio Agamben (1998) makes a separation between physical existence and political existence by drawing on a figure
from archaic Roman law. Agamben points out that a person who could be killed by anybody and who was not allowed to
be part of the dominant community was referred to as homo sacer. In this context, refugees and asylum seekers might be
classified as modern homines sacri because they are unable to assert a political and legal claim and are reduced to the status
of physical existence.

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to the neo-colonial centre through the imitation of ‘them’ values and norms, in
return, reinforces and legitimises existing colonial narratives regarding racial and
cultural hierarchies and leads to the perpetuation of the colonial situation in a
different context, which reminds the reader of the case of the colonial subject.
This suggests that Alem – a fictional representative of the sociocultural reality of
refugees in the contemporary world – might be considered as a colonial subje-
ct and that postcolonial theory might, thus, help articulate the reproduction of
the binary paradigms of the orientalist mentality by refugees through a detailed
analysis of Alem’s interpellation into the dominant power structure. Considering
these arguments, whether postcolonial theory might, in the general sense, be
functional and useful for the study of refugee literature will be a foundational no-
tion for my examination of the refugee characters, especially Alem, in the novel3.
This article will also attempt to conceptualise the process of postcolonial inter-
pellation through institutionalised postcolonial discursive practices in the twent-
y-first century and investigate how it operates and gradually circumscribes and
orientates refugee ‘subjects’ into grateful minorities having ‘ideal’ personalities.

2. The Process of Postcolonial Interpellation

Postmodern capitalism discursively constructs the absolute truth through a set
of superior symbols, images and narratives, which function as invisible forms
of power and are non-coercively circulated and dictated all around individuals,
and sorts individuals into adopting the identity and personality presented as the
proper and the natural. This ideological and intellectual hegemony consequ-
ently “hails” individuals in social interactions and relationships and practically
reproduces the relations of production and, therefore, the hegemonic rule of the
dominant class (Althusser, 1971: 173). This process in which an individual is in-
tegrated into the social, cultural, political, economic, ideological and intellectual
operation of ‘power’ within the logic of the prevailing mode of production can be
referred to as interpellation.
Interpellation basically operates through abstract institutional forms and inter-
nalised assumptions which manufacture consent and indirectly dominate and
control individuals (Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 2008; Hardt and Negri, 1994; Nea-
lon, 2018). In the postmodern era, individuals are not forced but asked to think,
act or get dressed in accordance with the values and norms of the power me-

3
Claire Gallien similarly points out that postcolonial theory has a lot to say about refugee literature and that postcolonial
scholars should attempt to define a refugee poetics and aesthetics in order to critically articulate the ideologically prob-
lematic modes of the representation of refugees in literary texts and to focus on what literature might propose in terms of
alternative discourses, voices and imaginaries (2018: 722).

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chanisms of the system. Individuals might seem to be free in terms of deciding

how they think, act or get dressed; however, they, in reality, prefer to identify
themselves with the particular characteristics of the identity formed in relati-
on to the social relations of production. Deleuze (1995) frames this voluntary
transformation in the context of a mutation in contemporary capitalism which
resulted in a transition from disciplinary society to the society of control: “We’re
moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but
through continuous control and instant communication” (174). As a result of the
replacement of the institutionalised rigid mechanisms of disciplinary society by
different socio-political control mechanisms in postmodern society, individual
subjectivities are dynamically deconstructed and reconstituted without direct
coercion in order to assure and promote the effective perpetuation of the soci-
o-political hegemony of the money oriented world.
To exemplify, individuals, despite having the freedom of wearing traditional clot-
hes in the workplace, do not usually opt to do so since they would like to create
a ‘professional’ image and present themselves through ‘proper’ dress codes. In a
similar way, individuals, rather than using their local accents, prefer to make use
of the ‘right’ accent in order to sound smarter and not to be judged by others.
This desire to adopt what is ideologically determined to be the normal by the
powerful functions as a means to gain status, to climb the social ladder and to
be socially accepted and included. In other words, in order not to experience
otherisation, marginalisation and isolation, individuals voluntarily perform the
ideal personality of the dominant power structure which is implicitly dissemina-
ted through different apparatuses such as the education system and traditional
and digital media. It subsequently helps the powerful exercise their hegemonic
power without using force and disciplinary mechanisms and consolidate their
own sociocultural, ideological and intellectual narratives at the level of the whole
social body.
This process might be said to operate in a similar way for immigrants who are
originally from the former colonies of the British Empire and live in the UK today.
In order to overcome lack of a stable identity, cultural insignificance and existen-
tial crisis, immigrants tend to become part of the mainstream society through
the adoption of the proper immigrant identity. This identity, which can actually
be seen as reminiscent of the colonial discourse in the twenty-first century, is
discursively formed as the embodiment of the absolute truth and passively exer-
ted through the sociocultural practices of the neo-colonial centre. Fitting into
the boundaries of the proper immigrant identity, which is promoted on different

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636 Sercan Hamza BAĞLAMA

platforms helps immigrants become more visible and sustain their political exis-
tence in the mainstream ‘white’ society.
As in the case of ‘ordinary individuals’ belonging to the majority in a Western
country, immigrants in the neo-colonial centre might, to a certain extent, have
the freedom of following a traditional lifestyle; however, they seem to have a
tendency to voluntarily attempt to ‘normalise’ their own social and cultural pra-
ctices and internalise and perform what is constructed as the superior and the
proper in order to be appreciated and recognised and to overcome cultural deba-
sement and denigration. To put it in a different way, despite the fact that immig-
rants might come from different backgrounds, races and ethnicities, they might
be accepted and included in direct proportion to their sociocultural, ideological
and intellectual interpellation into the neo-colonial centre. Such an interpella-
tion reconstitutes hierarchical sociocultural relations between ‘the insider’ and
‘the outsider’ and subsumes the colonial subject into the traditional civilised/
uncivilised discourse which constantly reproduces the myth of the civilizational
superiority of the West. This is basically what I refer to as the process of postco-
lonial interpellation.
Contemporary postcolonial fiction might help reinforce this conceptualisation
since it is usually inspired by material life and therefore reflects and mediates an
imagined totality of sociocultural, economic and political circumstances in their
specific historical forms. NW (2012) by Zadie Smith, for instance, fictionalises the
postcolonial interpellation of Keisha Blake into the dominant logic of the ma-
instream ‘white’ society. As a black woman born into a working-class family in
London, Keisha interiorises the social, ideological and moral truths and norms of
the neo-colonial centre and performs the requirements of ‘an iconic immigrant’
in order to overcome her sense of powerlessness, meaninglessness and nothing-
ness. This consequently secures visibility and respect and helps her actualise her-
self as an upper-middle person in the dominant social order. In a similar way, in
The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) by Hanif Kureishi, Karim Amir, a mixed-race tee-
nager, assumes that he will become more ‘legitimate’ and respected and fit into
the ideal immigrant identity when he mimics those ‘proper’ ‘white’ Londoners.
He, thus, internalises the practices and forms of knowledge of the Establishment
and would like to belong to the neo-colonial centre socially and culturally. This
sort of interpellation within a postcolonial framework functions as an illusory
means to enjoy a position of self-esteem, appreciation, acknowledgement and
honour and subsequently delegitimises his own ‘real’ identity and subordinates
him to the reproduction of existing power relations.

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3. Postcolonial Interpellation in Refugee Boy

In Refugee Boy, the case of Alem, the protagonist, is not different from that of
immigrant characters in the above-mentioned postcolonial literary texts, and his
pathological obsession with thinking and acting in accordance with whatever
is presented as the ideal and the proper by the orientalist discourse leads him
to relocate and redefine his personality and intellectuality. The internalised as-
sumption that he might be granted asylum when he becomes a ‘proper’ person
and does not cause any problems results in his gradual interpellation into the do-
minant logic of the neo-colonial centre. As a refugee, Alem voluntarily embraces
‘the proper refugee identity’, which inaccurately creates a new social and cultural
reality for him, and associates himself with the particular characteristics of that
identity in order to be tolerated, recognised and included. His interpellation into
the boundaries of the dominant system within a postcolonial framework might
essentially be split into two distinct types: a) sociocultural interpellation and b)
ideological interpellation. This section of the article will, in this context, attempt
to articulate the operation of the two types of postcolonial interpellation throu-
gh a close reading of the novel.
In the novel, Alem’s father takes him to London for holiday for the celebration of
his fourteenth birthday. They visit London for sightseeing; during the visit, Alem’s
father constantly asks Alem to speak ‘proper’ English (15). When Alem makes
mistakes while speaking English, he corrects his son’s English and feels sorry for
him (20). When they visit Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circle, Alem’s father, for
example, tries to put on the best upper-class accent he could (8). The reason
why speaking English in a ‘proper’ way is so significant for the refugee characters
might be about the fact that the language of the ‘insider’ is constructed as the
symbolic embodiment of refinement, civilisation and sophistication whereas the
language of the ‘outsider’ is debased and aligned with negative characteristics,
which is actually the residual aspect of the monologic discourse of orientalism.
Their attempt to be excellent in English is functional for them in terms of soun-
ding intellectually sophisticated and credible, creating a dialogical space betwe-
en themselves and those in the dominant metropolitan centre and securing cul-
tural capital for inclusion and mobility.
Despite the fact that Alem is not forced to master ‘proper’ English, he prefers to
improve his English through individual effort and initiative in order not to con-
front his otherness which is constantly perpetuated by prevailing assumptions
regarding cultural hierarchies. This preference is not an explicit consequence of
a systematic oppression mechanism but of social/neighbourhood pressure. To

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638 Sercan Hamza BAĞLAMA

exemplify, in one episode, the teacher tries to help him boost his confidence
and asks a few questions; however, Alem becomes confused and repeats what
Christopher loudly whispers to him because his level of English is not at an ad-
vanced level yet and he does not, therefore, feel confident: “I’m sorry, I’m just a
wanker” (127). The whole class, afterwards, roars with laughter and mocks him,
which makes him feel ashamed of himself and urges him to improve his level of
English mainly through the replication of the other boys (97). When Alem beco-
mes fluent at English, his relationship with his classmates starts to ‘normalise’
since his classmates perceive him as a ‘familiar’ person. In this context, through
mastery of English, Alem, in a way, gets rid of his otherised and precarious sta-
tus, becomes the recognisable other and establishes his political existence as a
refugee. Such an indirect ‘normalisation’ process by means of the acceptance
of the superiority of anything Western – the proper – interpellates him into the
neo-colonial centre socioculturally.
While identifying England with positive characteristics and qualities, Alem, per-
haps unconsciously, degrades and demonises his own roots and identity. This
should, of course, be grasped within the framework of orientalist epistemologi-
cal formations because it entrenches existing orientalist narratives and norms
and leads to the internalisation of dichotomised cultural differences based on
the civilised and the uncivilised. This subsequently creates a situation in which
Alem develops an inferiority complex, which has social, cultural and intellectual
aspects, and strives to compensate for his insecurity, unbelonging and low sel-
f-worth through mimicking the sociocultural and ideological rituals of the domi-
nant social order. To exemplify, Alem is not surprised at the fact that everything
is so orderly and well-organised in England (11), and becomes happy and feels
proud when he visits all the places he has seen in the books such as Marble Arch,
Piccadilly Circus, Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London (15). In another
episode, he eats spaghetti4 in a posh restaurant and thinks that the spaghetti he
has eaten in London tastes much better than the spaghetti back home. Despite
wondering the country of the origin of spaghetti, he cannot even pluck up his
courage and ask it to the waiter in order not to feel intellectually inferior (19).
After living with his foster family, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald, he imitates their lifesty-
le which he perceives to be the superior. In order to make a good impression in
court, he, for instance, puts on a smart suit before his trial and asks the Fitzgerald
family whether he looks nice or not (136).

4
This is probably a result of the colonisation of Eritrea by the Kingdom of Italy, which officially lasted from 1890 to 1947.

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 A Postcolonial Approach to Contemporary Refugee Literature:
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639

Alem’s hunger to learn what others think of him and to prove himself as a ‘pro-
per’ person within the context of the perceived realities and truths of the centre
is metonymically the direct result of his hunger for appreciation, recognition,
visibility and self-actualisation. His acceptance of Western standards and values
as a means to measure the significance of his existence actually leads him to
voluntarily restructure his identity and perform the proper refugee identity asc-
ribed by the dominant society, which, in return, ensures tolerance and inclusion:
“This is the lad … Alem’s been a wonderful lad, everybody likes him, no trouble at
all – I wish there were more like him” (28). This is, thus, another example of the
sociocultural aspect of postcolonial interpellation in the novel and explicitly rein-
forces the argument that refugee narratives reproduce the coloniality of power
in a different context as a consequence of their postcolonial dimension.
The fact that Alem might become part of the neo-colonial centre in proportion
to his ability to fit into the proper refugee identity also reveals the changing logic
of the concept of racism in contemporary society. Unlike traditional racist argu-
ments based on the racial superiority of one group over another, the relatively
recent form of racism in postmodern capitalism – neo-racism – has a primarily
cultural rationale and articulates the perceived differences through cultural ele-
ments rather than biologically-determined arguments. To put it in another way,
racism differentiates races as the superior and the inferior while neo-racism dif-
ferentiates cultures as the superior and the inferior (Balibar 1991; Salecl 1994).
In this regard, the progressive and refined culture is of European origin and the
backward and primitive culture is that of the periphery, which is, no doubt, an
extension of the ideological hegemony of the colonial discourse. However, des-
pite having similar dynamics to racism, neo-racism might be said to be ironically
more inclusive because it might, to a certain extent, pave the way for those from
marginalised cultures to be accepted into the dominant culture. Reforming and
reshaping their identities and personalities in order to be the culturally proper,
therefore, function as a marker of belonging and ensure integration into the ma-
instream ‘white’ society as in the case of Alem. Such a sort of ‘control’ mecha-
nism in postmodern capitalism manifests that ‘whiteness’ is no longer a racial
or biological category and that anyone who would contribute to and reproduce
the reification of the sociocultural, ideological and economic hegemony of the
Establishment would be welcomed.
Considering these arguments, Alem’s gradual ideological interpellation, which
corresponds to the reconstitution of his own mindset in accordance with the ar-
guments of the British colonial heritage and the current political Establishment,

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640 Sercan Hamza BAĞLAMA

also helps him reshape the unstable sense of who he is and where he belongs to,
move beyond his displaced subjectivity and ideologically actualise himself as an
‘insider’. Alem’s acceptance of the fact that the UK will support his application
for asylum because of its historical tendency to support those in a desperate
situation is central to understanding this process. Despite potentially offering an
opportunity for his sociocultural inclusion as a refugee in London, such an expe-
ctation, on a broader perspective, presents refugees as helpless, vulnerable and
passive victims while justifying the active, benevolent and powerful role of Bri-
tain, and indirectly leads the refugee characters in the novel to consolidate the
binary paradigms of the monologic discourse of orientalism. The argument that
survival and emancipation are only possible through the intervention of the West
is a revelation of the reproduction of the so-called dependency complex and,
therefore, the hierarchical relation between the centre and the periphery, which
subsequently results in the disempowerment of the refugee characters within a
politically-correct humanitarian discourse.
To give an example, in one episode, Alem’s father sends a letter to Alem and says
that there are many organisations in England which are very passionate about
understanding and helping people escaping from wars. Despite apparently reve-
aling the inhumane conditions in the war zone, the content of the letter, howe-
ver, describes the happenings in the region with dark and negative qualities like
a colonial text and implicitly emphasises the significance of solidarity and huma-
nitarian action:
Today I found the arm of a man lying at the side of a street. No body, just one arm. And
I found myself asking trivial questions like, “Is this an Ethiopian or an Eritrean arm?”.
Could you believe it? … War is eating away at our souls, young man, it is terrible …
When I came back I found that your auntie’s house had been looted and burnt … The
organisation of EAST as fallen apart … our only surviving branch is in London. (106-107)

Such a representation of the region – the East5 – reminds the reader of the co-
lonial depiction of the predicament of victims, thereby discursively debasing the
Orient while locating the Occident to a politically and morally superior position.
In another episode, the applications of Alem Kelo and his father for asylum are
rejected and the friends of Alem – Robert, Buch and Asher – decide to start a
campaign. Although Alem’s father thinks that the issue should not be politicised,
the campaign starts and a petition with more than six thousand signatures is
handed down to a local MP. One sentence in the petition is significant since it

5
It does not refer to a certain geographical location; instead, it refers to anywhere which is not part of what is discursively
presented to be the sociocultural boundaries of the ‘West’.

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 A Postcolonial Approach to Contemporary Refugee Literature:
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fictionally exposes the responsiveness of the UK in terms of mobilising humani-

tarian action towards the suffering of unfortunate others: “As British subjects,
we believe that it is our duty to offer them protection until it is safe for them to
return to their homeland” (247). At the end of the novel, Alem is awarded asylum
and he states that he is grateful and thankful to Britain: “I shall repay all which
this country has given me” (285). What creates the indebtedness of Alem – an
example of his ideological interpellation– is the intervention of the UK on behalf
of the unfortunate and its ‘effective’ action through its own political and juridical
institutions as part of its moral ‘responsibility’. This creates grateful refugees as
in the case of grateful immigrants in postcolonial fiction and essentially literalises
the operation of the discursive hegemony of the colonial discourse in contempo-
rary society.

4. Conclusion
Refugee Boy, which can be classified as an example of contemporary refugee
literature, fictionally offers an insight into the refugee experience and portrays
the interpellation process of refugees into the logic of the mainstream ‘white’
society in a Western country through its protagonist who can be seen a fictio-
nal representative of refugees in the contemporary world. As a refugee, Alem’s
hunger to fit into the proper refugee identity in order to be appreciated, ack-
nowledged and included in the neo-colonial centre leads him to internalise the
discursive formation of the normal within the context of the narratives of the
orientalist discourse and to accordingly remould and reshape his identity and
personality. Such a tendency indirectly legitimises and reproduces the colonial
situation in a different context and reminds us of the case of the colonial subje-
ct in contemporary postcolonial fiction. Drawing on postcolonial theory might,
for that reason, be useful for the articulation of the experiences of Alem since
existing colonial narratives function as an invisible form of power and sort Alem
into a grateful refugee whose actions and arguments constantly perpetuates ins-
titutionalised postcolonial discursive practices and the civilizational superiority
of the West. Despite the fact that his sociocultural and ideological interpellation
into dominant power structures within a postcolonial framework – postcolonial
interpellation – might relatively ensure tolerance, acceptance and inclusion, it
is actually an apolitical and defiant tendency which implicitly glorifies the moral
and historical ‘responsibility’ of the centre as part of the discursive continuity of
orientalist epistemological formations.

Cilt 5 / Sayı 10 / Temmuz 2020

642 Sercan Hamza BAĞLAMA

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Mülteciler ve göçmenler Atina'da uçağa biniyor, Reuters